


Here's to you

by gloss



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Future Fic, Gen, HSWC, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-25
Updated: 2013-07-25
Packaged: 2017-12-21 08:58:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/898385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roxy's gone. </p>
<p>For Bonus Round #4 in the HSWC; <a href="http://hs-worldcup.dreamwidth.org/8507.html?thread=2147643#cmt2147643">prompt here</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here's to you

All they had was a moment, the brief interval between the time Jane came back to herself but before Roxy faded away completely.

In that moment, Roxy clutched at Jane with slightly transparent hands, kissed her with flickering lips while Jane shuddered in the fast-descending storm of guilt. Every horrible, evil thing she had done for Betty assailed her, nearly swamping out the urgency in Roxy's voice, the anxiety of her touch.

"Janey, Janey --"

Jane grasped Roxy's arms. She could see her own palms through Roxy. She tightened her hold and felt her hands close into fists. "Roxy!"

Roxy glimmered, the building and sky behind her sharpening, becoming clearer, and then there was nothing. No one there before Jane, her fists raised, her mouth open.

She was free(d) but alone; Roxy had won, but gone.

They weren't finished with the game. Far from it -- there was still Lord English to find and defeat -- but Jane was done. She didn't know it then, but she was.

*

They built a new world. Jane ended up in a creaky Victorian house on the top of a steep hill, its mangy yard surrounded by a black iron fence.

No one gave up on Roxy. Ill-considered stubbornness was, after all, their hallmark. Dirk built robot bodies for the souls that Rose lured from the ether, or the afterlife, or whatever realm she was poking about in at the time. The things she dredged up -- squalling sports, dead-ends, variants on familiar faces -- were grotesque and sad and nothing like Roxy. 

Jane took in the ones that managed to survive. They roamed the upper floors of her house, muttering in alien tongues, clanking about on robot limbs, quarrelling with each other, plotting their ways back home.

She felt quite foolish, living this spinster life, as if she'd gotten stuck back in that single moment. Who was she to mourn Roxy like a widow? What had she ever been to Roxy? Certainly nothing more than a perennially uptight stick-in-the-mud with a marked tendency to get brainwashed.

"Bullshit," Dirk told her when she said as much. "Rank, steaming moobeast shit."

It was Roxy's birthday (so far as anyone knew; the carapaces who'd rescued the baby were long gone). Dirk showed up on her porch in the middle of the afternoon with several bottles of wine and a tub of pasta salad. "You call this a party? Get on with the baking," he said and slapped his stomach. "We're going to need one huge-ass cake."

She complied. What else did she have to do? This year, she made something reminiscent of the Sno-Ball snack cakes Roxy had always coveted but which rarely survived their transportalizer journeys: three layers of dense Italian chocolate cake frosted with strawberry-coconut icing.

It was just the two of them this year.

Dirk's sunglasses were prescription now, his hair thinner and softer. His face had lines, which you couldn't call "smile lines", not on Dirk. Scowl lines, perhaps. Grimace traces. He had never filled out. He was still the same lanky stringbean he'd been the first time she saw him, the first time she'd died. 

The low evening sun was ruddy on his face, the same luminous shade as the dregs of the wine in their glasses.

He was handsomer now, she though, less sharp, slightly more at ease. He'd never be fully relaxed; none of them would be, not really. 

She knew that she must look different, too. It was only normal: time passed, left tracks across your body, and they had been through more time, more twisted labyrinthine temporal traps, than most. But when she looked in the mirror, she couldn't see the changes that must be there. She lived with her face, never got a chance to observe its age.

If she were here, Roxy would probably look nearly the same, if not more beautiful than ever. 

"As I was saying --" Dirk leaned forward, glasses slipping a little down his nose, until he'd made sure he had her attention. Then he sat back, recrossing his legs, right over left now, his canvas slip-on dangling from his long toes. "-- bull. And also shit."

Jane shrugged. The sun etched bright edges around the clouds on the horizon, lavender and carnation and bruise-blue. "Perhaps."

"She fucking loved you. She got you back when the rest of us --" Dirk stopped and drank down the last of his wine.

"It's okay," she said and opened the next bottle. Dirk leaned over, holding out his glass, and she poured for him. "I know the rest of you gave up on me."

It had been long enough that she didn't care about that, not any longer. For a while, however, after Jake spilled the beans (Good gravy, Jane, I beg of you, don't tell them you know, it's quite the conspiracy of silence, you know...), the fact that she was written off was tied with Roxy's disappearance for the source of her greatest pain. What else was she to do with the fact? She never should have been saved; had she not wasted so much void to get Jane back, Roxy might very well be here right now, celebrating her birthday, laughing into the sunset, raising her glass and toasting all those left behind.

"Or she could have gotten tetanus the next week and died," Dirk said flatly. "Nobody knows."

"Never imagined you'd get to be quite so zen."

He snorted and cut himself another slice of cake. "Zen, resignation, whatever you call it, all comes out in the wash."

Soon enough, the sun stopped loitering on the horizon and the night drew in, chilly and dark. Dirk shuffled off to the guest room, wine bottle tucked under his arm, but Jane remained out here on the porch. Crickets sang and sawed while stars flickered.

Sometimes late at night, nights just like this, she swore she felt Roxy. Not her touch, not her ghost -- Jane was far too well-acquainted with several different ghosts to ever mistake this sensation for Roxy's ghost -- but just _her_. A shift in pressure, a slightly greater weight to the air before her, an echo of a lilting laugh.

Not every night, not even frequently, but often enough that Jane kept hoping. She pictured Roxy pushing herself back into existence, out of the void, acquiring existential heft and realness gram by aching, hard-fought gram. She wanted Roxy to make it home; she needed to be there if it happened.

She hoped.


End file.
